Former Windows Chief Sinofsky Joins Box as Advisor

Former Windows chief Steven Sinofsky is keeping busy since leaving Microsoft and jumping into his new role at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

0shares

Former Windows chief Steven Sinofsky is keeping busy since leaving Microsoft. After jumping into his new role at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and joining the board of auto-sharing company Local Motion, the tech heavyweight has now signed on as an official advisor to cloud storage and collaboration service Box.

In his new role with Box, Sinofsky will "lend his experience and insights" to help the company advance its platform strategies and organizations to the next level," Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie (below), wrote in a blog post Thursday.

Levie said he first reached out to Sinofsky about six months ago via an "unsolicited Facebook message," and the relationship grew from there.

"Steven has a stronger and more fluid vision for the future of computing than almost anyone I've met," Levie wrote. "As we kept talking and sometimes meeting over Pho, I realized we had to get him involved with Box."

He added that the former Microsoft executive has "spent much of his career thinking about technology transformations, navigating them, and — in many cases — helping to drive them. We're very excited to have him advising us as we hopefully bring the next generation of tools to the next billion workers."

For his part, Sinofsky said in a Facebook post that he's "looking forward to having fun and working with the team at Box."

Levie has been critical of Sinofsky's former employers in the past, arguing that Microsoft has failed to innovate and released applications that don't actually solve users' problems.

"What we've seen is a complete lack of innovation from Microsoft and Oracle, because when you don't have competition, you have no need to constantly drive performance improvements, functionality, and innovation, and that's what's happened," Levie said in a 2011 interview with PCMag.

Sinofsky left Microsoft in Nov. 2012, shortly after the launch of Windows 8. In December, he announced that he would head to Harvard Business School in the spring of 2013 to teach "product development" and write articles about the topic. Sinofsky will remain at Harvard while working on Andreessen Horowitz projects.

Angela has been a PCMag reporter since January 2012. Prior to joining the team, she worked as a reporter for SC Magazine, covering everything related to hackers and computer security. Angela has also written for The Northern Valley Suburbanite in New Jersey, The Dominion Post in West Virginia, and the Uniontown-Herald Standard in Pennsylvania. She is a graduate of West Virginia University's Perely Isaac Reed School of Journalism.
More »

Automatic Renewal Program: Your subscription will continue without interruption for as long as you wish, unless
you instruct us otherwise. Your subscription will automatically renew at the end of the term unless you authorize
cancellation. Each year, you'll receive a notice and you authorize that your credit/debit card will be charged the
annual subscription rate(s). You may cancel at any time during your subscription and receive a full refund on all
unsent issues. If your credit/debit card or other billing method can not be charged, we will bill you directly instead. Contact Customer Service